December 11, 2017 AT 9:00 am

The Word Cyber Now Means Everything—and Nothing At All

James Shires and Max Smeets ponder the word cyber (what it means and, more importantly, what it doesn’t) in a recent piece on Slate.

The term cyber has been around for decades, stretching back to MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener’s coinage of cybernetics in the 1940s. Wiener borrowed the ancient Greek adjective ‘kubernētikós’, meaning governing, piloting, or skilled in steering, to describe then futuristic idea that one day we would have a self-regulating computing system, solely running on information feedback. In the 1980s, novelist William Gibson married the prefix to space, creating the term so ubiquitous today. Since then, cyber has been used by anarchists and policymakers, scholars and laymen, artists and spies. It has been attached to concepts ranging from warfare to shopping, and it can denote opportunity as well as threat.

Yet, cyber is, in a way, empty: It acts like a sponge for meaning, soaking up whatever content is nearby. Gibson described this nicely in an interview with the Paris Review: “The first thing I did was to sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling—infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, oh, that’s a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth—I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow.”